Testing Relation: Breaking and Balancing Testimonies of Prisoner, Slave, and Holocaust Survivor in Caryl Phillips's Higher Ground

Abstract

There no life or culture, no art or philosophy separated from whole expression of human life and being on planet. It separation that first strand of barbed wire for fences at Auschwitz, more modern versions of southern plantations. Amiri Baraka For edouard glissant, identity linked ... to conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures, is produced in chaotic network of Relation, and circulates, newly extended (144). an occupation of abyss, of state of exception. As opposed to absolute, which the dramatic endeavour to impose truth on Other, relational the obscure need to accept other's (Caribbean Discourse 147-48). Difference in relationality the difference between (in sense of relating and connecting) ... not liminal space but (Cox 18). Relational history, like Marxism, criticize[s] concept of linear and hierarchical History (cd 64), and because not only absence for us, it vertigo (cd 161), it necessitates creative approach (cd 61): The past, to which we were subjected, which not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. duty of writer to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in continuous fashion to immediate present (cd 63-64). This occurs as exploded, suffered time in novels of Americas (cd 144). Relationality implies paradigm shift in metaphor: All kinds of evidence are brought to surface and valued relationally, alongside, rather than according to received schemes of repression or denial of certain features that do not fit mold or that go against grain (Cox 8). Ian Baucom comments, Indeed, this passage from exception to relation, this passage from vision of exceptional suffering and of those violently excepted from history, to vision of unity, solidarity, functions as shorthand code for, or condensation of, Glissant's entire poetics of relation (310). Yet there are clear limits to Glissant's unity. preliminary definitions of imply significant differences between Blacks and newcomers to New World: former group has not brought with it, not collectively continued, methods of existence and survival, both material and spiritual, which it practiced before being uprooted (cd 15). Slaves were transformed elsewhere into another people (cd 15), as (not directly named by Glissant) were not. If a word for those new 'transverse' forms of culture, identity, and solidarity that emerge from act of holding to, enduring, relating, and avowing our (present's) relational complicity with most violent scenes of exchange (Baucom 311), then denial of Jewish peoples (surely participants in one of modernity's most violent scenes of exchange) might seem to be at odds with this goal. Can identity meet non-transformed identity? Can non-relational identity be used to critique diasporic models? And if one of major challenges facing Blacks and finding common ground, then it might be worth investigating places where they do meet. One of these places in novel Higher Ground. What Caryl Phillips's novel points to necessity for participants in Black culture to be (re)cognizant of Jewish identity, not merely insofar as it enables Black identity but as it in itself. text clearly relational (particularly in its techniques) yet interrogates one of underlying assumptions of relation. There lengthy, troubled history of Black-Jewish relations, particularly in U.S., against which Phillips's novel should be read but which must remain peripheral here. Briefly, despite some joint activism in Communist Party in 1930s and 1940s, and more in 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, Jewish-American and African-American communities have often failed to identify common causes for various economic, social, and political reasons; instead, Jews and blacks have each embraced America's conception of other (Thomas 207). …